Since the initial application of the 'affordances' concept to the context of language learning by van Lier, relatively few studies have continued to explore its implications for second language (L2) learning. This study examines from an emic perspective the affordances that 13 Spanish learners in a study abroad context perceived in their…

This paper describes a mixed methods study of Japanese first-year tertiary learners' attitudes to English language learning models. It outlines the results from a survey comprised of a verbal guise test (measuring respondents' attitudes to both linguistic and personality features) and vocabulary elicitation, which was administered to 87…

We examined the naturalistic pronunciation development of two groups of L2 speakers over 10 years. Initially, 50 beginner ESL students participated in production tasks; despite attrition, the tasks were administered eight more times. Here we report listener judgements of accentedness, comprehensibility and fluency for the remaining six Mandarin…

In the contemporary information-rich academic environments, the superabundance of information sources requires that readers compose balanced referential representations of topics presented in sets of sources that provide divergent standpoints on them. Prior beliefs have been reported to skew the representations that readers build based on such…

Student engagement research in the field of English language teaching (ELT) has substantially increased in recent years. However, there is a research gap concerning the up-to-date analysis of the current state of student engagement research in ELT. This study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the historical evolution of trends in…

This article reports on the rationale, implementation, results and evaluation of four rounds of co-creative Citizen Science (CS) projects (2021-2024) conducted with 10 public secondary schools in Opole, Poland. These educational interventions consisted in facilitating 18 team research projects designed and executed by 55 teenagers…

Studies have shown that informing language learners about the literal underpinning of idioms can help them to remember these expressions. It has also been suggested that prompting learners to guess the meaning of lexical items may be beneficial because it can pique their curiosity and promote cognitive engagement. In the case of idioms, the…

While CLIL programmes have been extensively researched for their impact on L2 learning outcomes, the relationship between young learners' L2 proficiency and subject knowledge has received less attention. This study aimed to address this research gap by examining the science content knowledge of two cohorts of Grade 5 students (n = 100) from two…

The paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork in a Language Introduction program for recently arrived students in an upper secondary school in Sweden. In a short period of time, this program prepares students for using Swedish as an academic language, in order to enter a national program. One response to this challenge is that schools allocate the…

The present study investigated six experienced English as a second language (ESL) teachers' metalinguistic knowledge of the English intonation system through analysis of their metalanguage. Participants' metalanguage related to intonation was collected while completing three tasks: (1) a semi-structured interview, (2) a simulated teaching…

This study used eye-tracking to investigate the real-time processing of phonetic and semantic radicals (components of Chinese characters that give clues to their pronunciation and meaning) by intermediate-level university Chinese foreign language (CFL) learners. Additionally, the study examined how knowledge and awareness of radicals affect…

Teachers of all subjects and grades must remain aware of the linguistic and cultural diversity among their students, as second language learners often experience educational disadvantages. Therefore, (pre-service) teachers must acquire pedagogical language knowledge and skills in linguistically responsive teaching (LRT), and develop positive…

There has been an increased interest in multimodality in the field of both language pedagogy and translation studies. To our knowledge, however, only a few empirical studies have investigated students' perceptions and learning through translation classrooms focusing on multimodality. This paper reports on multimodal translation tasks implemented…

While much research supports the benefits of computer-mediated collaborative writing (CW) in second language (L2) classrooms, the assessment of CW has received scant attention. This study proposed an assessment scheme considering both the products and processes when assessing online synchronous CW, and explored its effects on learners'…

This paper examines the role of metacognitive awareness in academic writing in a mixed-method study. In addition to validating an instrument assessing metacognitive knowledge and strategies in the context of academic writing, the study uncovered how Chinese multilingual students' metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive strategies, and metacognitive…